November 25th, 2009

Death of the black box EULA

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Internet, Legal, Satire, business models, mass market, values

Tags: Software, Box, EULA, End User License Agreement, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.

I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)

Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.

1. I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
2. I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
3. All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
4. The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
5. The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
6. Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.

Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.

Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.

The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.

But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.

So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.

The war against the black box EULA was on.

The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.

This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.

So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.

The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.

It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.

The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.

There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day.

April 15th, 2009

The $22 billion open source stimulus package

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:29 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Implementations, Satire, mass market, video

Tags: Tea, Stimulus, Open Source, Investment, Finance, Dana Blankenhorn

Black Duck says U.S. businesses can save $22 billion per year simply through re-use of open source software.

While Matt Asay likes the Black Duck release’s bigger number, $387 billion in equity value for all open source code, it’s the potential savings from re-use I want to focus on. After all, we can get it every year and it’s growing.

While $22 billion may not seem like a big number, placed against the $787 billion stimulus package signed in February, it’s still serious coin.

It’s more than six times the amount of money New York City got in the bill. It’s seven times the equity value of Red Hat. It’s over half what Bill Gates is worth following the stock market crash.

Of course it’s not real money. In order for you to get your piece of this stimulus, you have to make maximum use of open source software in your operations. You have to do more than download. You have to put the software to work.

Which means you need to join the open source community in a major way, and be ready to exchange the “precious bodily fluid” of code, and code knowledge, with other folks. Including your competitors.

Given how today’s tea bag protesters are calling the President and his supporters Socialist (or worse) for raising tax rates to Clinton-era levels, and keeping deficits at Bush-era levels for some time to come, how would they react to this?

Once they recognized what must be done to secure the money? (The video is from Ukranian Andrewf403, posted on YouTube last September. I figured it was a family-friendly, non-political illustration of knowledge gained with a tea bag.)

April 1st, 2009

Microsoft signs Linux compatibility deal

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:32 am

Categories: Satire

Tags: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Open Source, Software, April Fool 2009, Dana Blankenhorn

Microsoft announced this morning it has signed an historic agreement with the Linux Foundation guaranteeing compatibility between Windows and Linux going forward.

Software Freedom Law Center head Eben Moglen began the move last week when he sent a delegation to Redmond during negotiations which resulted in the recent cross-license deal between Microsoft and TomTom.

His Columbia-trained lawyers were accompanied by a new hire, attorney Vito Soprano, formerly of the firm Dewey, Cheatham & Howe in Hoboken, New Jersey, who said he made Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer an offer he could not refuse.

The picture of Mr. Ballmer above was taken by ZDNet photographer Abraham Zapruder III right after their meeting.

“Mr. Ballmer said ‘Bill Gates will roll over in his grave if he heard about this’ but I reminded him that Mr. Gates is not dead. Yet,” Mr. Soprano said.

Ballmer said in a press statement this morning agreement also followed a call from President Obama on Air Force One, who first asked “Can’t we all get along,” and later suggested Ballmer might be fired if he did not go along.

“Remember Waggoner,” Ballmer quoted the President as saying. “I got the message.”

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said his group is sending a trio of its best programmers by train from Portland to Redmond in order to examine Microsoft’s source code and assure its compatibility with Linux going forward.

“We are delighted that Microsoft has finally seen the light and we hope everyone in the market for software considers Microsoft’s fine products carefully in making their future decisions,” said Zemlin.

File and exchange compatibility will be built first into the newest version of Windows Mobile, now undergoing final testing at a lab in China.

Version 4.1 of Windows Mobile carries a code name which combines the Chinese characters for joy and sorrow in an ideogram meaning, in English, fool.

PS - it’s April Fool’s Day. There may be no truth whatsoever in this story.

February 26th, 2009

Open source for hard times

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:27 am

Categories: Distributions, GPL, General, Implementations, Internet, Satire, mass market

Tags: OpenGoo, Scribus, TextPattern, Kino, Pidgin, KPresenter, Amarok, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Friend of the blog Erica Zeidenberg, who represents the good folks at Palamida, has been flogging an “open source job hunters toolkit,” filled with open source programs you can use, free, in your job hunt.

(This classic photo from the last Great Depression was done for the WPA by John E. Allen Inc.)

Of course, if there are no jobs you can’t hunt anywhere. But maybe if you get yourself a used Netbook and find an old stick memory sitting around, you can load these offerings as you head out for the real open road:

1. OpenGoo is the open source Web office that lets you collaborate with your fellow jobless and organize that people’s revolution we have all been waiting for. Compare it to the student version of Microsoft Office.

2. Scribus is the open source desktop publishing program for Linux that will help you get out those flyers telling other homeless people where the demonstration is. Compare it to Adobe Illustrator.

3. TextPattern is a flexible content management system that also helps you publish standards-compliant Web pages that print nicely. The revolution deserves a good Web site.

4. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation System, is great for resizing or extracting bits from pictures like the one above. I use it all the time. You can use it to virtually link the President to the workers’ enemy of the moment. Compare it to Adobe Photoshop.

5. Kino is a cool video editor for Linux. You can use it for that revolutionary film you have been planning, “Triumph of the Geeky.” You can compare it to Final Cut Pro.

6. Pidgin is the universal chat client that gets you over all those proprietary walls erected by “the man” so you can communicate between cells. It even supports custom smileys, so if you want to add a Che Guevara beard to yours go right ahead.

7. Mozilla Thunderbird is the e-mail client I use here at ZDNet Open Source. It’s a good replacement for Microsoft Outlook Express, plus you can add-in features like a calendar so you won’t be late for the revolution.

8. KPresenter is the presentation piece of the KOffice suite. This will let you demo your revolution so it won’t be confused with those of splitters like the Judean Peoples’ Front or People’s Front of Judea. That would be very embarrassing.

9. Amarok is an open source music player, an iTunes replacement, which will be one of the 15 projects honored with a booth at CeBIT next month. If you can’t dance to the revolution what is the point?

Anyway, good luck, and we’ll see you on the road. Unless President Obama can pull off a real economic recovery. In which case you’re all invited back to work.

December 22nd, 2008

Funny is hard

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:41 am

Categories: 2008 Review, General, Satire, publishing

Tags: Satire, Humor, Russell Shaw, Intellectual Property, Open Source, Research & Development, Business Operations, Dana Blankenhorn

Humor is the hardest card for a writer to play.

It’s no coincidence that the greatest humorist in American history, Mark Twain, was also its greatest writer.

I’m no Mark Twain. I’m not even Adam Felber. But sometimes my anger can inspire me to satire, as in the 15th most popular item posted here during the year, Does Open Source Programming Make You a Criminal?

My ire was raised by the results of an interview I had thought would result in a tribute to my late friend Russell Shaw. Instead Matt Richel (above) made it plain he aimed to claim blogging killed Russell, which was so crazy I began to laugh.

Writing was as natural to Russell as breathing. It’s a passion we shared. The only retirement for a real writer is a pine box, I thought. Russell has retired to Florida.

Then I began to write.

Many open source critics have accused it of being intellectual property theft, so I just ran with that idea, coming up with some off-the-wall thoughts that might equate open source with crime.

I’m not going to pretend it was any Jumping Frog, but it did draw 144 talkbacks from interested readers, some of whom missed the <satire> and </satire> tags I put at the top and bottom of the piece.

Not only is humor hard, I learned from these responses, but it does not travel well either. For two people to agree something is funny, they require the same frame of reference.

This point was illustrated by one of Jerry Seinfeld’s better commercials, an American Express bit where he spent money learning about England so he could be funny there.

I’ll try to leave humor to the experts in the future, but you never know. Stay tuned.

November 20th, 2008

Some open source attacks on Windows may be unfair

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:22 am

Categories: General, Linux, Linux Server OS, Microsoft, Satire, Security

Tags: Attack, Microsoft Windows, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn, Microsoft Corp., Home Page

Here is one.

Pingdom recently did a comparison of uptime for the home pages of major OS distributors — 16 Linux distros, Apple, and Microsoft. (The image is a reduced screen grab of their chart — see the whole thing.)

Over the course of a month Apple’s downtime was 2 minutes, putting them in the middle of the pack. Microsoft’s? An hour and 19 minutes.

This proves what, exactly? That we all need to switch to Knoppix, whose home page experienced zero downtime? That Arch Linux really stinks?

Microsoft’s corporate home page is a favorite target for script kiddies and no-goodniks everywhere. The page is complex and constantly changing. And no matter how big your budget the page, in the end, is always the work of a small team.

I can’t imagine Microsoft has someone whose job it is to sit in front of a terminal with the home page in front of them and jump or ring an alarm bell if it goes down.

Now, I have to give Red Hat credit. Both their corporate and Fedora home pages were bulletproof during the test period. But what if the power goes out tomorrow? Is their software suddenly bogus?

There are a lot of ways to compare operating systems in a Web environment. One is how your own home page holds up, and the pages behind it. Another is to look at faults over a period of time and count only those tied to software.

But this comparison, to my way of thinking, is unfair and silly.

Let me end on a humorous anecdote. My son, who is in high school, has a running gag. He wants us to give him a grant so he can create a “time machine,” based on an experiment in which he throws rocks at our house until it goes back in time.

Should I send him to Pingdom for the grant money?

July 31st, 2008

Disasters at Whistler raining on Mozilla's summer parade

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 11:02 am

Categories: Events, FOSS, General, Internet, Microsoft, Satire, wireless

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Corp., Summit, Firefox Summit, Microsoft Windows, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, Software, Internet, Paula Rooney

A rock slide, power outage and loss of a top engineer of Firefox 3 have some attendees of Mozilla’s 2008 summer summit wondering if the ghosts in Redmond aren’t raining on their parade.

The Firefox summit is behing held at, ahem,  Whistler, the code name of Microsoft’s Windows XP.

First, a giant rock slide on Wednesday closed the road from Vancouver to Whistler, trapping many at the summit in and any latercomers out. Since the road will be closed for five days, attendees will have to take an alternative route to the airport — turning a three hour ride into an eight-hour odyssey.

Then the hotel hosting the summit lost power this morning after a truck hit the transformer.

That’s on top of the loss of a significant Firefox exec. Earlier this week, Mozilla v.p. of engineering, Mike Schroeper, a top developer of Firefox 3, announced he is resigning from the open source project to go to Facebook.

Did we mention that the weather at Whistler has been gloomy all week?

Here’s one report from an attendee.

“To add insult to injury here at the Mozilla Summit, we now have no power.  I am told that a laundry truck hit the transformer for the hotel around 6:00 AM … We’re on battery power, which is good for ten hours or so. Luckily, they estimate that the power will be fixed in five hours but I’m not sure what that is in metric,” wrote one developer on Planet Mozilla.  It was not seen if the driver of the truck was a Microsoft employee or a bear. I’m afraid to get on the gondola to go to the mountaintop for the big dinner tonight though.”

Another attendee pointed the finger at Canada.

Still another said that despite the “fear and loathing” at Whistler, the summit has been a smashing success the content and backup power generator. 

Still, we hope organizers aren’t planning to revisit next year to neighboring Blackcomb mountain. “Blackcomb” is the code name of the next iteration of Windows, once code named Vienna and now known as Windows 7.

May 16th, 2008

Open Source in 2013

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:30 am

Categories: General, Satire

Tags: Job, America, World Entertainment Shortage, Recruitment & Selection, Open Source, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Dana Blankenhorn

<satire>

<source>

Thank you. (Picture from Fox, America’s only network. My picture at the top of this blog is expected to look much like this one in 2013, if I shave and get the combover right.)

The hectic but repetitive routine of business and journalism often seems to consist entirely of back and forth charges between companies, punctuated by demos, trade shows and the occasional press release, followed by another barrage of wanking and counter-wanking, turned into sound bites preferred by blog readers.

Users, however, can be forgiven their uncertainty about what companies hope to achieve if the market simply moves their way. We spend too little time and offer too few specifics on that. We make promises, of course, that our software will work. But they often are obscured, mis-characterized and forgotten in the heat and fog of an update cycle

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the calling center jobs which were done so terribly in Delhi and Bangalore.

The War against Microsoft has been won.

Windows is now a functioning community, although still suffering from the lingering effects from decades of FUD and marketing tension. Reboots still occur, but they are spasmodic and much reduced. Civil suits have been prevented; patents dispensed with, the Linux QA team has proven itself professional and competent.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 30th, 2008

Does open source programming make you a criminal?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:04 am

Categories: General, Satire

Tags: Open Source, Programmer, Programming, Computer, Wally, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Dana Blankenhorn

<satire>

The New York Times is working on a story saying open source programming makes you a criminal.

Matt Richtel (right) called for an interview soon after learning that a jury had convicted open source programmer Hans Reiser of first degree murder.  (Picture from TwelveBooks Publishing.)

It just makes sense, he told me during the interview. If blogging kills, then programming must lead to criminality.

Yes, I replied, but that only makes sense if programmers are killing bloggers.

What? Richtel stammered. Never mind, I said.

And so on the interview went. Fortunately I had plenty of examples to give him, from my own work covering open source for ZDNet.

• I told him about programmers who stole another programmer’s can of Coca-Cola out of the company refrigerator, even after he clearly marked it as his. The victim called this “sharage” and brought a case to work the next day, but still…

• There was a programmer who took his laptop home every night. The bosses were certain he was stealing corporate secrets. So every day they inspected his hard drive, and found nothing. Years later the security chief found the now ex-employee driving a fancy car and confronted him. “I knew you were stealing something. What was it?” “Laptops.”

• I told him how one programmer infested his cubicle with ants, claiming he was a messy eater. The next day another programmer had murdered them all with a bottle of bleach.

• Did I have to tell him all those stories of computer crime, of hackers and crackers, spammers and virus authors? The computer must have made them do it.

• Open source itself is just stealing, you know. It’s like Abbie Hoffman writing “Steal this Book.” Steve Ballmer will vouch for this personally, I assured him.

• Just yesterday I saw a programmer, lost in thought, crossing a street against a red light!

• You know “Dilbert” is just a textbook for programmer criminality. Wally’s the real boss of the crime family. Just run the strips backward. They read “the boss is dead.”

The Times man was excited by all of this, and I wished him well. But I also promised I would get you, my loyal readers, involved in this important investigation.

So what other examples of computer criminality have you seen? </satire>